New Product Development: Stage Gate vs. Stanford D.School.
How quickly should you begin testing your product idea? I'd say sooner than you would like. Most people want to wait until they have a solid prototype before going into the market at all. I think that this stems from a fear that if they turn off the first few customers they meet these customers won't buy the product.
Guess what? They probably won't anyway. And, you can't get a sale with everyone you meet. It's better to get some feedback early and then modify what you are doing rather than holding back too long.
The Stanford Design School focuses on rapid ideation and deployment to optimize feedback and usability.
The model below is a registered trademark as part of a NPD method created by the Product Development Institute. I share it as a point of comparrison, and a road map.
There are no speed limits to this chart - only those we impose on ourselves. And the limitations of physical time and space. By which I mean, sometimes it takes time to build a prototype. However the scope of that project should be designed to fit the information you hope to gleen. Maybe a beta that only does one thing is sufficient to determine how it will be received. And, you can always find more people to get more information.
